Bitten

How to spell bitten

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bitten

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bitten mean?

1. verbPast participle of bite: having been gripped, pierced, or wounded by teeth, or, figuratively, seized by a strong feeling.

Bitten in a sentence

• The hiker had been bitten by a mosquito on her ankle.

• Every slice of the apple had been bitten before lunch.

Where does bitten come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past participle of the verb 'bite', which descends from the Old English bītan, meaning 'to pierce, cut, or grip with the teeth'. That verb belongs to a large family of Germanic relatives, including the Dutch bijten and the German beissen, all tracing back to a common ancestral root meaning 'to split or cleave'. The participle form once appeared as 'biten' with a single t, but as English settled its spelling conventions the consonant was doubled to keep the preceding vowel short, giving us 'bitten'. That same short-vowel logic explains the spelling of 'written' and 'smitten', which follow the identical pattern. The figurative phrase 'bitten by the bug', meaning gripped by sudden enthusiasm, grew naturally from the literal image of being seized by something with teeth.

How the word is built

• bit (from bite: to grip with teeth)
• -en (past participle suffix)